Forbidden Knowledge
David Evans, The Holy Bible
Bloomsbury, 152pp, £9.99, ISBN 978-1501331701
reviewed by Rhian E. Jones
A quarter-century after its release, the Manic Street Preachers’ third album sounds as otherworldly and as close-at-hand as ever. A still-extraordinary listen, chilling and scalding by turns, the album is immersed in politics, sex, death, war, religion and all other subjects unfit for the dinner table. David Evans’ addition to Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series is a careful and thoughtful examination of The Holy Bible that manages to make sense of an album with which, as I discovered when writing my own study, it's hard to know where to begin.
Sensibly enough, Evans doesn’t begin at the beginning, but with a prelude depicting the band’s 20-year anniversary playing of the album at Cardiff Castle, a somewhat surreal experience that cemented their unlikely place as national treasures. From there he tracks the band’s formation and the album’s conditions of production, from the scarred Welsh Valleys to Cardiff’s docklands to the band’s downward-spiral tour of Thailand in the spring of 1994, and thought-provokingly documents the facts and mysteries surrounding Richey Edwards’ vanishing in February 1995.
The Holy Bible is driven by many divisions – innocence/experience, personal/political, self-disgust/self-obsession – but Evans settles on one based on the Welsh terms hiraeth and hwyl, depicting the album as strung between these two emotions. Drawing on the academic Chris Williams’ reading of Richard Burton’s diaries, Evans invokes hiraeth, a concept approximating nostalgia, dwelling on loss and looking back; and the ecstatic forward momentum of hwyl – the word comes from the wind filling a ship’s sails – which conveys the kind of visionary spirit that distinguishes several of Wales’s most prominent spiritual and political leaders.
Evans’ decision to examine the album’s lyrics separately from the music was initially a surprise – for me at least, their serendipitous synchronicity is another of the dialectics on which the album’s impact depends. It does mean, though, that James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore, rather than being overshadowed by the retrospective idea of the album as Richey’s masterwork, here receive their due for the sensitive and imaginative managing of lyrics that can border on the indecipherable. Musically, Evans grounds the album in postpunk, a genre rooted in post-industrialism and political upheaval, and identifies it as an example of Mark Fisher’s ‘popular modernism’: avant-garde art by working-class artists. He also insightfully examines the influence of the Welsh chapel tradition on Richey’s lyrics and outlook – one of the album’s obvious hermeneutic keys, but not one I recall being deeply explored in contemporary reviews, which focused more on Foucault than fire-and-brimstone. The shadow of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike, experienced here, as elsewhere in the band’s work, as a cataclysmic Fall, leads Evans to identify the album’s lyrical yearning for childhood as a prelapsarian state of innocence as both personal and political – before the knowledge of either sin or Thatcher.
It’s a peculiarity of Manics fans that we sometimes seem to dislike more than we like about the band, and often rush to emphasise their absurdities and flaws, as though worried that others will assume we haven’t spotted our idols’ feet of clay. Still, there is a lot that validly unsettles about The Holy Bible, beyond what is intentionally unsettling. It would be ludicrous to pretend that no one in 1994 raised an eyebrow at the liberal-baiting, pro-death penalty bloodlust of ‘Archives of Pain’, but the album now looks eyebrow-raising for different reasons: its gender politics best described as idiosyncratic; the shy Stalinism (and worse) one can tease out of the lyrics and aesthetics; its urge towards purging and purity. Most obviously, the contrarian swipes of the still-magnificent ‘PCP’ raise the ghastly spectre of a middle-aged Richey ending up writing op-eds for Spiked.
Evans is even-handed in exploring the implications of The Holy Bible’s worldview: there was a certain amount of hopeful left-populism in the mid-Nineties, as quickly squandered as it was, but the album’s bleak absolutism admits nothing of the compromised reformism that New Labour offered. Evans rightly skewers ‘the etiolated liberalism, the historical amnesia, the putative erasure of class difference, the lunkhead “reclamation” of the British flag’ that fuelled the band’s disgust with the politics and culture that surrounded them. In particular, he looks back at the band’s 1993 tour for Gold Against The Soul, dogged by controversy over their attempts to highlight ‘a creeping complacency in British culture’ towards resurgent nationalism, from the electoral success of the British National Party to Morrissey’s onstage flag-flourishing. Britpop’s exuberant chauvinism might have re-routed some of this, but the Manics were always cautious that the movement merely papered over cultural fault-lines.
The Manics played an Anti-Nazi League concert in early 1994, expressing their concern at a far-right resurgence across Europe, further contradicting the idea that racial tension and neofascist apologism have suddenly arisen from nowhere in post-Brexit politics and culture. And also further complicating the album’s Soviet iconography and Richey’s straightforward admiration for political hardliners. At 25 years’ remove from Britpop and Blairism, now that liberal capitalism and even democracy look like the kind of temporary lull described in ‘Of Walking Abortion’, the album has an enduringly accurate perspective. Never swept up in Nineties end-of-history triumphalism, The Holy Bible was not so much prophetic of our current state, but a warning which knew it would never be heeded.
Evans stresses the traditions of self-education, rooted in socialism, that suffused the band’s place of origin, quoting Jonathan Rose in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes on the South Welsh coalfields’ ‘special ferment’ of self-improvement and cultural institutions created by working people. This history, and its residual effects, both explains a huge amount of the band’s own psychology and provides a powerful reminder of the mendacity of current media and political definitions of working-class people as hostile to ‘pretentious’ intellectual and cultural pursuits. These are the kind of portrayals against which the band constantly kicked, and which were frustratingly rife in the Nineties and after.
When discussing the 4-Real incident, which saw Edwards attempt to prove his rock n’ roll integrity to a doubtful journalist by cutting the phrase into his forearm, Evans correctly observes the relative uselessness of ‘authenticity’ to a band whose class status made them aware of the need to be luridly cartoonish in order to be noticed at all. Discussing the cultural and political loss of the idea of the working-class scholar, Evans locates within The Holy Bible a rage against and resistance to it. This is one aspect of the album that speaks as vividly to me now as it did in my early teens: songs like ‘Faster’ and ‘PCP’ are alive with zealous glee, with sheer glorying in working-class command of language, literature and high art – in receiving education as forbidden knowledge, and displaying scalpel-sharp awareness of the social control it enables.
Evans’ portrait of the adolescent Manics notes that both Edwards and Nicky Wire had been offered previous chances at individual routes out of the Valleys – Wire via football, Edwards via a grammar-school scholarship – which they passed up in favour of remaining with friends and family. Music, sport and education have been time-honoured means of class transcendence, but the pull of provincial community can give certainty, security and comfort even as it holds you back from fulfilling your potential. The band’s eventual path out, however, also demonstrates that, for the perennially under-confident working-class would-be achiever, it can be easier to escape as part of a more secure collective, bearing the shared weight of responsibility and representation more easily than an individual can. This explains both the intensity of their Last Gang in Town stylings and the immense appeal it had for a fan-base consisting largely of isolated teens. But the band’s concern, after their own escape velocity, was always how to raise the whole class with them – or else to level the rest.
Sensibly enough, Evans doesn’t begin at the beginning, but with a prelude depicting the band’s 20-year anniversary playing of the album at Cardiff Castle, a somewhat surreal experience that cemented their unlikely place as national treasures. From there he tracks the band’s formation and the album’s conditions of production, from the scarred Welsh Valleys to Cardiff’s docklands to the band’s downward-spiral tour of Thailand in the spring of 1994, and thought-provokingly documents the facts and mysteries surrounding Richey Edwards’ vanishing in February 1995.
The Holy Bible is driven by many divisions – innocence/experience, personal/political, self-disgust/self-obsession – but Evans settles on one based on the Welsh terms hiraeth and hwyl, depicting the album as strung between these two emotions. Drawing on the academic Chris Williams’ reading of Richard Burton’s diaries, Evans invokes hiraeth, a concept approximating nostalgia, dwelling on loss and looking back; and the ecstatic forward momentum of hwyl – the word comes from the wind filling a ship’s sails – which conveys the kind of visionary spirit that distinguishes several of Wales’s most prominent spiritual and political leaders.
Evans’ decision to examine the album’s lyrics separately from the music was initially a surprise – for me at least, their serendipitous synchronicity is another of the dialectics on which the album’s impact depends. It does mean, though, that James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore, rather than being overshadowed by the retrospective idea of the album as Richey’s masterwork, here receive their due for the sensitive and imaginative managing of lyrics that can border on the indecipherable. Musically, Evans grounds the album in postpunk, a genre rooted in post-industrialism and political upheaval, and identifies it as an example of Mark Fisher’s ‘popular modernism’: avant-garde art by working-class artists. He also insightfully examines the influence of the Welsh chapel tradition on Richey’s lyrics and outlook – one of the album’s obvious hermeneutic keys, but not one I recall being deeply explored in contemporary reviews, which focused more on Foucault than fire-and-brimstone. The shadow of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike, experienced here, as elsewhere in the band’s work, as a cataclysmic Fall, leads Evans to identify the album’s lyrical yearning for childhood as a prelapsarian state of innocence as both personal and political – before the knowledge of either sin or Thatcher.
It’s a peculiarity of Manics fans that we sometimes seem to dislike more than we like about the band, and often rush to emphasise their absurdities and flaws, as though worried that others will assume we haven’t spotted our idols’ feet of clay. Still, there is a lot that validly unsettles about The Holy Bible, beyond what is intentionally unsettling. It would be ludicrous to pretend that no one in 1994 raised an eyebrow at the liberal-baiting, pro-death penalty bloodlust of ‘Archives of Pain’, but the album now looks eyebrow-raising for different reasons: its gender politics best described as idiosyncratic; the shy Stalinism (and worse) one can tease out of the lyrics and aesthetics; its urge towards purging and purity. Most obviously, the contrarian swipes of the still-magnificent ‘PCP’ raise the ghastly spectre of a middle-aged Richey ending up writing op-eds for Spiked.
Evans is even-handed in exploring the implications of The Holy Bible’s worldview: there was a certain amount of hopeful left-populism in the mid-Nineties, as quickly squandered as it was, but the album’s bleak absolutism admits nothing of the compromised reformism that New Labour offered. Evans rightly skewers ‘the etiolated liberalism, the historical amnesia, the putative erasure of class difference, the lunkhead “reclamation” of the British flag’ that fuelled the band’s disgust with the politics and culture that surrounded them. In particular, he looks back at the band’s 1993 tour for Gold Against The Soul, dogged by controversy over their attempts to highlight ‘a creeping complacency in British culture’ towards resurgent nationalism, from the electoral success of the British National Party to Morrissey’s onstage flag-flourishing. Britpop’s exuberant chauvinism might have re-routed some of this, but the Manics were always cautious that the movement merely papered over cultural fault-lines.
The Manics played an Anti-Nazi League concert in early 1994, expressing their concern at a far-right resurgence across Europe, further contradicting the idea that racial tension and neofascist apologism have suddenly arisen from nowhere in post-Brexit politics and culture. And also further complicating the album’s Soviet iconography and Richey’s straightforward admiration for political hardliners. At 25 years’ remove from Britpop and Blairism, now that liberal capitalism and even democracy look like the kind of temporary lull described in ‘Of Walking Abortion’, the album has an enduringly accurate perspective. Never swept up in Nineties end-of-history triumphalism, The Holy Bible was not so much prophetic of our current state, but a warning which knew it would never be heeded.
Evans stresses the traditions of self-education, rooted in socialism, that suffused the band’s place of origin, quoting Jonathan Rose in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes on the South Welsh coalfields’ ‘special ferment’ of self-improvement and cultural institutions created by working people. This history, and its residual effects, both explains a huge amount of the band’s own psychology and provides a powerful reminder of the mendacity of current media and political definitions of working-class people as hostile to ‘pretentious’ intellectual and cultural pursuits. These are the kind of portrayals against which the band constantly kicked, and which were frustratingly rife in the Nineties and after.
When discussing the 4-Real incident, which saw Edwards attempt to prove his rock n’ roll integrity to a doubtful journalist by cutting the phrase into his forearm, Evans correctly observes the relative uselessness of ‘authenticity’ to a band whose class status made them aware of the need to be luridly cartoonish in order to be noticed at all. Discussing the cultural and political loss of the idea of the working-class scholar, Evans locates within The Holy Bible a rage against and resistance to it. This is one aspect of the album that speaks as vividly to me now as it did in my early teens: songs like ‘Faster’ and ‘PCP’ are alive with zealous glee, with sheer glorying in working-class command of language, literature and high art – in receiving education as forbidden knowledge, and displaying scalpel-sharp awareness of the social control it enables.
Evans’ portrait of the adolescent Manics notes that both Edwards and Nicky Wire had been offered previous chances at individual routes out of the Valleys – Wire via football, Edwards via a grammar-school scholarship – which they passed up in favour of remaining with friends and family. Music, sport and education have been time-honoured means of class transcendence, but the pull of provincial community can give certainty, security and comfort even as it holds you back from fulfilling your potential. The band’s eventual path out, however, also demonstrates that, for the perennially under-confident working-class would-be achiever, it can be easier to escape as part of a more secure collective, bearing the shared weight of responsibility and representation more easily than an individual can. This explains both the intensity of their Last Gang in Town stylings and the immense appeal it had for a fan-base consisting largely of isolated teens. But the band’s concern, after their own escape velocity, was always how to raise the whole class with them – or else to level the rest.